When Robert Smith defied death with a dramatic drunken stunt
The Cure were known for their rocky beginnings. When they first formed as The Cure in the late 1970s, they found success with their darker take on the burgeoning post-punk sound.
At a time when punk was beginning to splinter into new directions, The Cure carved out a sound that felt both stark and atmospheric. Smith’s songwriting leaned heavily into mood and introspection, setting the band apart from many of their contemporaries who were still rooted in the raw aggression of the original punk wave.
In 1979, after releasing their uneven debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, frontman Robert Smith brought in Simon Gallup to replace Michael Dempsey on bass guitar.
Gallup’s style and songwriting skills made for a stronger follow-up album with 1980’s Seventeen Seconds which was famed for hits like ‘A Forest’ and ‘Play For Today’. The trio continued to gel with 1981’s Faith while garnering sizeable attention as a touring act across the UK. But by the time they were working on 1982’s Pornography, the working relationship between Smith and Gallup had begun to fray amid increased alcohol and drug consumption and a clash of egos.
The mounting pressure reached a head while the band was on tour in Europe in 1982. After a performance at Hall Tivoli in Strasbourg, France, Smith and Gallup found themselves in a fist fight with each other. “I was about to leave when some guy came up and told me I hadn’t paid for my drinks,” Gallup remembered in the book, Ten Imaginary Years. “He thought I was Robert. I was knackered, but the bloke took me up to the bar, and Robert appeared to see what was going on. I hit him, he responded, and we had a fight.”
Smith also gave his account of the drunken brawl. “I was on the first floor of this club when they came up and told me there was a problem downstairs,” Smith recalled. “Simon was so wound up that no one could talk to him – he was screaming at the barman, this young kid who was nearly in tears. By himself, Simon would have never behaved like that, but he was surrounded by the road crew, so he was behaving the way he thought a rock and roller ought to behave.”
He continued: “He didn’t want to pay for his drinks because he thought I wasn’t paying for mine. I told him to shut up, and he punched me. It was the first time he really laid into me, we had an enormous ruck, and I said ‘That’s it’, walked out, got a cab back to the hotel, got my suitcase, my passport from the tour manager’s room and got on the first flight to London. That was at 6.30am, and I was home by half past 10. I left a note saying I wasn’t coming back. Simon returned the same afternoon. I’d left, so I suppose he thought he could do the same. Good idea … we had three days off!”
These changing attitudes within the band were reflected in the darker musical output over this period. However, as drummer Lol Tolhurst put it at the time, it was more of a chicken and egg scenario. “The pressures of having to keep up the intensity and aggressive sentiments of Pornography turned Simon into someone different though, at the time, I don’t think he noticed. Or didn’t want to …”.
The music that emerged during this era mirrored the emotional volatility behind the scenes. Albums like Faith and Pornography embraced bleak textures and brooding lyricism, capturing a band pushing itself creatively while struggling to maintain stability offstage.
Shortly after the boozy bar brawl, Gallup left The Cure, and the band maintained a patchy existence while Smith collaborated with Siouxsie and the Banshees, with whom he had briefly toured back in 1979. Fortunately, Smith decided to continue with the Cure in 1984 and invited Gallup back to the band. The pair seemed to settle their differences at his point with a newfound maturity. Smith even asked Gallup to be his best man at his wedding in 1988, but their days of rock ‘n’ roll excess and madness weren’t quite behind them yet.
In a 2013 interview with The Guardian, Smith described his experience with heavy drinking, explaining his it’s something he depended on despite its ill effects. “I had some kind of road to Damascus experience drink-wise when I was 14, and it was at the bottom of a glass. In the past, I didn’t really give a shit about what I was saying, so I would just be drunk all the time. The only way I could get through a day of interviews was to have two drinks with every interview.”
While the sauce may have come in handy as a social lubricant during interviews, it wasn’t always quite so kind to his decision-making skills. One evening, after having a fair skinful, Smith bet a friend that he could traverse the perimeter of their hotel by jumping from balcony to balcony. “It took about an hour,” he recalled. “And once I got to a certain point, it seemed farther to go back to where I could hear [his wife] Mary screaming. It was lamentable, like one of those Beavis and Butt-Head ‘I bet you can’t do that’ things.”
Watch a 1986 interview with Robert Smith from a Munich beer garden below.
